Do You Have Money Tied Up In Greece?

If so, first off, what the hell is wrong with you. Second, if you do, you may not much longer whether you want to or not, as the banks there are starting to see a run. About $894 million was withdrawn from Greek banks on Monday. That's over 700 million euros. Compare with total deposits of about 165 billion. Which may still sound like a decent supply of money compared with the withdrawls, but remember that when a bank tells you their total deposits, they don't actually have that much money on hand, or even close to it. Remember that a lot of it gets loaned out and invested (or "invested"). The bank depends on having enough money actually on hand to be able to accommodate anyone who withdraws their money. If they can't do that, the bank collapses.

Greece appears to be on their way to self-fulfilling-prophecy themselves out of the euro: talking about the possibility of leaving the euro, mass withdrawls from already-beleaguered banks, and now talk about possible printing of the drachmas Greece got rid of so they could enter the euro.

By the way, it's ten days to go on the book draft, and there's a sprint to the finish line coming up so plan accordingly as far as content. (This post, for instance, would probably be about four paragraphs longer if I wasn't eager to get back to the book.)

Underage Gymnasts To Work As Greeters

One name you might remember from the Beijing Olympics is Ai Weiwei. He's the guy who designed the main stadium, the Bird's Nest, then distanced himself from the Olympics because of China's human-rights abuses, then got an impromptu bonus lesson on China's human rights abuses firsthand.

I'd just like to take a second to let you know that he's reacquainted himself with Olympic host cities, because British surveillance cameras are a fair sight better than the Great Firewall of China. He has designed a pavilion at London's Serpentine Gallery, alongside two Swiss architects whom he worked with when designing the Bird's Nest, Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron.

He had to work with them via Skype, because he's still stuck in Beijing under charges of... hang on, what did they charge him with again to punish him for not listening when China told him to stop telling the foreign media about the human-rights abuses? ...ah yes. "Tax evasion".

I Am Not Giving You Hints In The Post Title; Nice Try

I present to you today a seemingly simple task. Think back to the Dr. Seuss book 'Green Eggs And Ham'. I'm pretty sure you read it, or had it read to you, at some point; it's Seuss' best selling book. The book, just in case you weren't aware, was created using only 50 different words. Seuss and his publisher, Random House co-founder Bennett Cerf, had $50 riding on a bet that said Seuss couldn't do it.

Cerf never did pay up.

In any case, today, your seemingly simple task is to think back to Green Eggs And Ham, and name those 50 words within 5 minutes. And remember, you're all but gifted the first four.

Why only seemingly simple? I got only 37 of them.

Let Us Now Praise Total Assholes

People have been having rocks thrown at them by a total asshole. The 34-year-old asshole began his reign of terror by walking up to some tourists, with rocks in his hands, and began to screech at them. The tourists scattered before the asshole could throw the rocks.

Later on, the tourists ran into the asshole again, who was eating an apple. When they came too close, though, the asshole produced a rock and threw it at the tourists. No one was injured.

After that, the asshole proceeded to a hay bale, inside of which he hid more rocks. Anyone unfortunate enough to happen across him saw him produce a rock from the hay bale and had it thrown at them.

This behavior went on for months, because the asshole has nothing better to do than be an asshole for the sake of being an asshole.

Tragically, his assholish behavior is being praised by scientists. Because the asshole is a chimpanzee in Gavle, Sweden's Furuvik Zoo named Santino and the behavior is showing evidence of foresight, which they thought was strictly a human thing, as well as deception. A debate is underway as to whether he planned to be an asshole or if he just happened to have the opportunity to be an asshole when visitors showed up.

There may be experimental parameters set up in the future, so as to encourage Santino to continue to be an asshole for science.

Please Stop Predicting Mayan Doomsday Even Harder

You are hopefully aware that the world will not end this December, despite some people's best efforts. You are hopefully aware that the Mayan 'Long Count' calendar terminating on December 21 does not portend the end of the world.

According to an excavation of an ancient Mayan city, Xultan in Guatemala, that took place last year, now you can be aware that the Mayans didn't stop their calendar in 2012 at all; the calendar found stretches some 7,000 years into the future (though if that's 7,000 years counting from now or from when the calendar was made is unclear from the article). And if they were projecting anyone's end days, they weren't projecting ours. They were projecting their own- or trying desperately to project anything but their own. The calendar found dates to about 75 years before the collapse of Xultan, after the Mayan culture had already started falling. The whole point of a Long Count calendar, or any other cycle-based calendar, was to show that no matter what cataclysm befell a people, tomorrow will still start on schedule. The world will still go on.

That's what the Mayans were trying to tell themselves. Things will be okay. Remember that back then, following lunar cycles was a fact of day-to-day life. They based their economy around it; their crops around it. The National Geographic writeup describes it as their equivalent of the stock market. They were trying to find the point where the market bottomed out and started recovering.

For them, it bottomed out right around zero. For us, well... now you know why Greece has regressed to a barter economy.

Random News Generator- Tonga

Nothing all that earth-shattering coming out of Tonga right now, though don't mistake that for nothing important happening. A French company, Alcatel-Lucent, has won a contract to lay undersea fiber optic cable from Fiji to Tonga. What this is going to do is connect Tonga to a larger network, the Southern Cross Cable, which links Australia to the United States. That is, amazingly, a connection Tonga does not yet have. Undersea cables litter the bottom of the ocean; in fact, some are now just sitting there rotting as newer cables are laid and the old ones decommissioned. But none of those cables connect Tonga; as noted by Lord Tu'ivakano, Tonga's Prime Minister and Minister for Information and Communication, until now, they've been relying on satellite connections.

In other words, after the estimated 14-month project is completed, Tonga is finally going to be formally connected to the same Internet as everyone else.

Infrastructure!

Rapid-Fire Book Club, Recalculating Edition

Haven't added to the book club for a while, because of the little thing about me trying to write one and having to go through the soccer books I have on hand instead of reading anything new.

But I did find time to pick up one. I actually had to pick between two: Maphead: Charting The Wide, Weird World Of Geography Wonks by Ken Jennings (who you'll recall as the guy who rattled off that beyond-insane Jeopardy winning streak), or Drop Dead Healthy: One Man's Humble Quest For Bodily Perfection by A.J. Jacobs (who has three books on my shelf already in which he reads the encyclopedia front-to-back, lives for a year according to a literal interpretation of the Bible, and performs a mish-mash of other assorted experiments).

I went with Maphead. Drop Dead Healthy will probably be the book showing up in my house next.

After I'm done writing mine, that is.